Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Mike Hulme explains in The Guardian why "fossil fuel divestment is a misguided tactic". He lists diverse arguments: divestment is not a policy tool; it shifts focus on the 2 degree goal only and thus supports a naive narrative, and climate change is not only about fossil fuels but it is a wicked problem. Finally, there are the killer arguments "this does not work for India" and "this is feel good campaigning". When reading this, I got stuck with the argument of "feel-good campaigning". What exactly is meant by this, and why is it used as a derogatory term?

Mike Hulme once mentions Vattenfall in his article, and this reminded me of an annual campaign here in Hamburg against Vattenfall: "Lesen ohne Atomstrom" - "reading without nuclear energy, the renewable literatur festival". It is a high rank cultural event in its fourth or fifth year. It started as a counter-initiative to a campaign by Vattenfall that once had promoted literary events in Hamburg to improve its public image. Today, "Reading without nuclear energy" is an anti-nuclear, pro renewable energy and climate change campaign with considerable political influence; after a public vote last year, the Hamburg senate had to repurchase the power grid from Vattenfall.

Can you apply here Mike Hulme's arguments? (surprisingly, Vandana Shiva will represent India at this event). In my understanding, Mike Hulme's critique maybe does not fully cover the relevance of such a "feel good" campaign. From an anthropological point of view, this is one of the many ways how climate change and energy issues come to matter in public life. Events like "Lesen ohne Atomstrom" are part of emerging climate change cultures, where science-based knowledge is translated into vernaculars. Here, wicked problems like climate change, energy use, neoliberal politics, regionalization etc. are brought together and are negotiated, and I hesitate to judge this prematurely from a purely distanced science- and expert point of view. What Mike Hulme might disqualify as "purely symbolic" sometimes bears hidden political power. For example, Nina Hagen will recite Bertolt Brecht and thus provide a German "capitalism vs climate" moment that is both place-based and rooted in history.
(slightly changed 22.4.2015).

Divestment campaigns can no doubt make people feel good about themselves and the actions they are taking to make the world a better place. They can also put pressure onorganisations who don’t have active ownership structures but instead view themselves as accountable to a range of people who act as if they have ownership rights – think of universities and their faculty, students and alumni. All of this is noble.However, such campaigns may be inferior to a more activist alternative, which is to eitherincrease the investment or to work to pool the investments of like-minded shareholder groups so as to form ownership blocks that can demand changes in the board, management and strategy. In the end, it may be that moral outrage is not as effective as capitalism because one of the points of capitalism is to separate ownership from management while allowing owners control over managers. One can express moral outrage about short-term shareholder capitalism but shares do not care who owns them and it is the job of the shareholder as owner to ensure that the companyis run according to their wishes. If the divestment advocates want companies to operate according to different precepts, perhaps more active ownership control would achieve their goals more quickly and effectively."

It's nearly impossible to rouse public passion about what to do about climate the issue is so enormous and amorphous. Then along came the divestment campaign and this one did trike a chord. And it has many spin-offs, such as making corporations think twice about their future investments. It made concerned citizens feel like they weren't so powerless after all.

Then along came Mike Hume who said: "You're all wasting your time, go back into your shells you silly people."

In an interview last week at the Rockefeller family’s longtime New York offices at 30 Rockefeller Center, Mr. Heintz, Mr. Rockefeller and Valerie Rockefeller Wayne, the chairwoman of the fund, spoke of the family’s longstanding commitment to use the fund to advance environmental issues.

The family has also engaged in shareholder activism with Exxon Mobil, the largest successor to Standard Oil. Members have met privately with the company over the years in efforts to get it to moderate its stance on issues pertaining to the environment and climate change. They acknowledged that they have not caused the company to greatly alter its course.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/heirs-to-an-oil-fortune-join-the-divestment-drive.html?_r=0

BTW: There's a nice photo in your link. Maybe there are some people in the world who believe that Jan Josef Ackermann will raise some moral issues at Royal Dutch Shell. Some, but not many ;-)

"I agree that the FF divestment movement is a cultural and political reaction to the risks of climate change – and the desire to change the world. It is entirely legitimate – welcome I would say; perhaps needed to. (It is also worthy of academic study to see how and why it works and with what effect).

My point in challenging the campaign is to draw attention to elements of ‘what is at stake’ with climate change which FF divestment campaigners, or at least the more exuberant ones, might miss and also to suggest that there are other ways of political engagement and policy development – which might do more good. It is not all about 2 degrees and the trillionth tonne.

I see one of the comments in your thread accuses me of sneering – ‘those silly little people’. Not my point at all. As I have said elsewhere, what we need is more politics (read disagreement) in climate change and the divestment campaign asks some good questions (if it really is about dismantling shareholder capitalism, a la Klein, then let’s name it as such), but I disagree with Tutu that “all people of conscience” must endorse divestment.

feelgood-campaigning sounds harsh I know. The problem with the divestment campaign lies perhaps deeper as it shows a lack of imagination. Steeped in the old ways of left-wing campagning it tries to emulate something like the boycott Apartheid campaign with the difference that boycott of *all* oil companies would not work (it was tried with Shell and Exxon in the past). Hence the call for divestment which tries to identify a culprit. This search for someone to blame is is understandable (one of the most powerful narratives, good v evil) but completely wrongheaded.

I think, the big energy companies should not be enemies. They must be partners. That is one lesson of the German energy market transformation.

In the 1990s, grid operators (mostly vertically integrated companies, i.e., producers, transmission operators, grid operators, distributer, etc. were in one hand) blocked every alternative producers. They were supported by CDU/FDP. Well, the change came, and new feed-in laws, EEG, market liberation etc. And now: the big companies has some problems...

It would have been much better, to work together. Now, the collaboration is much better, because of liberated market (there are no vertically integration companies anymore), better laws etc. I think, it will be fine in the future. It is fun to work in the energy sector now.

Divestment is a global campaign that has Paris 2015 in mind. It is interesting to see how this campaign rubs up with specific national political cultures. In anglo-saxon countries, India is an important argument, maybe the colonial past or the demand for global leadership (US) play a role here. As much as I know, the question of "how much red is in the green" is hotly debated in England; the divestment campaign serves well to mark one's own position in relation to the left.

In Germany, there is a lot of resistance against neoliberalism and big companies; at the same time, in "Rheinian capitalism" the government traditionally intervenes into the market, as GHB's example of the energy transition or my Hamburg / Vattenfall example nicely show. (This also explains Naomi Klein's success in Germany, even in conservative media like FAZ; see the German debate about Google etc that resonates well with the divestment campaign).

As far as I see, the really new climate movement are the eco-modernists or pragmatics who seem to embrace capitalism, build upon science-based expertise and seek technological solutions. Like all "apostates" they of course have to use harsh words to mark the distance to those who are closest.

Third, the divestment movement (and the climate movement at large) has been successful at reframing climate change as a social justice issue rather than a technocratic issue. This has engaged large groups of people in new ways, especially young people. This is important because large groups of people need to be engaged on the issue for democratic action to be taken. Social justice and human rights issues have the potential to engage large swaths of the population because they use reasoning methods based on ideas of right and wrong, while technocratic issues do not because they use reasoning methods dependent on specialized training. At the same time the framing around divestment is flexible enough that it can be supported by the language of different professions (e.g., doctors and investment professionals).

The shift to a social justice framing, which is human-centric, also might allow the old political deadlocks surrounding leftist environmentalism to be broken or avoided. There is a growing identity among climate activists that is distinct from the “environmentalist” identity. This allows the inclusion of groups of people who do not consider themselves to be environmentalists or left-wing (in the American sense).

"Cities occupy just 1 to 3 percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people. As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts. The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity. ..."

Especially among young greens, that technocratic attitude is on the wane, especially in the wake of the 2010 cap-and-trade defeat, a decisive failure for the top-down, technocratic approach. Nowadays, activists are trying to put the plodding moralism back in, particularly through the fossil fuel divestment movement, which calls on institutions to cease all investments in the fossil fuel sector.

Nobody thinks the divestment movement can hurt fossil fuel companies in any direct financial way, but that's not what it seeks to do. Rather, it seeks to put mainstream institutions on record defining climate mitigation as a moral imperative, to create social consensus that inaction is not neutral — it is immoral.[...]The divestment movement is "only" symbolic, yes, but that woefully underplays the value of symbolism. Humans are tribal creatures. They take their cues from their peers, not from dispassionate surveys of the scientific evidence. It's called "social proof."

The framing of climate action as a moral imperative is not entirely new, of course. It has always existed, somewhat uneasily, alongside the technocratic impulse. But with fossil-fuel divestment, activists have turbocharged it.

Most activists lack social and economic power as individuals, but here they have found a way to leverage large institutions — which do have social and economic power — in the cause of providing social proof that fossil fuel investments are no longer socially acceptable. They, like the Pope, are now explicitly and effectively forcing people and institutions into a moral choice on climate.

thanks for this comment! I especially liked your sigh "too much for me", and the quote on the role of symbols in the debate. The differentiation between "only symbolic" and "scientific evidence" is notorious. It implies that "scientific evidence" is free from ideology, which it is certainly not. Instead, it is closely linked to expert regimes and to favoring technocratic measures over politics. And it implies that "rational planning" is superior to "culture" (aka: symbols) - culture is always presented as something we (scientists) have to count with, but deep in our heart we detest it.

But I have to admit that I am still undecided what to think about the divestment campaign. Are there any German examples? To me, it is still very much related to the American debate, but this might be due to my lazyness ("too much for me").

The same issue is at stake in the debate about the manifesto that Reiner initiated.

China's one-child policy of 1979 only provided the last 20 % of Total Fertility decline since 1960.

See here:http://www.coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%20Buttons/clip_image002.gif

This decline is a secular trend in ALL countries experiencing economic growth and human development. It is driven by economic growth, education and labour market participation of women, lower child mortality, and yes, as a necessary by not sufficient condition, access to contraceptives. Even countries such as Iran, Turkey or Tunesia are approaching or even below the replacement fertility level of 2,1. BTW, policy interventions to influence the fertiliy rate often prove to be very costly per outcome, particularly when they rest on positive incentives instead e.g. of punishment (the latter can only be sustained in authoritarian regimes).

Population growth and CO2 emissions: Had China not experienced that swift fertility decline, its per-capita growth would have been much smaller. Smaller per capita incomes mean much lower CO2 emissions. It is therefore not easy to know ex-post whether fertility decline has reduced or (what I believe) rather accelerated China's total national emissions.

I tried to avoid figures and numbers in order not to turn off Dr. Krauss.

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